Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Download full essay

Interurban Railroaders and Changing Work Conditions on the South Shore Line, 1908–1938
Martin Tuohy

The morning of Tuesday, 21 July 1914, dawned fair and warm. In Michigan City, Indiana, six men gathered shortly before seven o’clock in the small railroad yard at the shops of the Chicago, Lake Shore and South Bend Railway. Nearby, a motorman and conductor had coupled a powered, wood-body box motor to a four-car work train in the shops yard, outside the imposing, white brick shop building with its pitched roof. Behind box motor number 500, a flatcar held large reels of steel wire and an upright wooden pole with a block and tackle for hoisting and unreeling the wire. An old freight boxcar, converted into an unpowered line car by constructing an insulated and electrically grounded wood platform atop the roof, held tools, equipment, and the fixtures necessary for repairing or replacing the copper overhead catenary wires. Behind the tool car, two freight gondolas that dated from the construction of the railroad in 1906–1908 held raised plank platforms atop wooden bents placed inside the gondola sides.

At about seven o’clock, the six electrical line workers climbed aboard the box motor that would pull their work train. The motorman moved the controller into the first point, pulling the train out from the shops. The train rolled westward to the passenger station at Eleventh Street and Franklin Avenue, where it picked up foreman O. T. Britt and lineman Albert E. Fellers. The crew then followed about fifteen minutes behind westbound passenger train number 8, a local train from South Bend that stopped at every station and flag stop along the line up to Gary to pick up passengers and milk cans, then ran express from Gary to Pullman, Illinois. Running as an unscheduled extra, the five-car work train had to duck into sidings several times to allow scheduled eastbound passenger trains to pass. The work train and its line crew ran through Hammond about nine o’clock that morning, crossed over to the eastbound track, then stopped on a curve about one hundred feet from the Illinois–Indiana state line and about a quarter of a mile from the South Shore station at Hammond. The thirty-seven-mile trip from the Michigan City shops to Hammond and the railroad’s State Line curve took about two hours.

Albert Fellers, known to his coworkers as Bert, had hired on as an electrical lineman for the Chicago, Lake Shore and South Bend Railway from September 1913 until January 1914, then returned just after Easter of that year. In some ways, Fellers’s life and work as a lineman represented the historical changes that propelled widespread migration from farms to cities and the technological advances that accelerated the pace of daily life. Born in March 1887 on a farm near Cedar Falls, Iowa, Fellers grew into young adulthood in a rural environment of agricultural work, becoming a strapping six feet, two inches in height and 210 pounds in muscle. When Fellers left the farm at the age of twenty-one in 1908, he found a job as a lineman in Des Moines, climbing poles to string telephone, telegraph, or electrical wires. Although the nature of a lineman’s work required a man to move from town to town after he completed each job, Des Moines apparently required enough communication and power lines to keep Fellers employed in the city for two or three years. By 1911 or 1912, though, he had moved on to Ferris, Texas, south of Dallas, followed by Tulsa, Oklahoma. Similar to other men before him who traveled the country to obtain work on steam railroads during the latter half of the nineteenth century, Fellers became a “boomer,” a skilled itinerant worker who followed the paths of utility line and interurban railroad construction throughout the Midwest according to the waves of economic booms and busts and the demand for or abundance of electrical linemen.

In 1913 the South Shore Line experienced seventy-four separate instances of pantagraphs atop the interurban cars tangling in the overhead catenary wire and damaging or even tearing down the wires and the pantagraphs. To a large extent, the troubles with pantagraphs catching the overhead wire indicated that the Number 0000 grooved copper contact wire, underneath which the pantagraphs slid along, had become badly worn after more than five years of daily use. Serious wire breaks occurred somewhere along the railroad twenty-three times in 1913. That spring of 1914, after the railroad had installed eighty automatic block signals along fifty-five miles of its seventy-six-mile line, its superintendent of overhead lines turned toward replacing the copper overhead contact wire with a new grooved steel auxiliary “slipper” wire along the eastern length of the railroad.

Normally, a line crew consisted of a foreman and two men. However, the work of replacing the worn-out copper wire with new steel wire required additional linemen. How Fellers and the other linemen learned about the job stringing the new steel wire has been lost to history, but he hired on and began working for the South Shore just after Easter, 1914. Eventually he earned $3.60 per day. The men slowly worked westward from Michigan City, covering each foot of the railroad’s middle section, clamping the new steel wire to the old copper contact wire, and twisting the new wire into place just below the old. One of the linemen on the job, Albert “Rusty” Warring, described the work process:

Now, after three months and thirty-five miles, the line crew reached Hammond, Indiana, on the Indiana–Illinois state border.

Already that morning of 21 July, the temperature at Hammond had risen to the mid-80s by nine o’clock, with winds blowing from the west at more than ten miles per hour. While a little windy and warm, a summer day like this made the work of linemen far easier than outdoor work with broken wires in subfreezing temperatures after one of northern Indiana’s infamous winter “lake-effect” snowstorms or sleet. The characteristics of this section of the railroad line, however, gave a line crew some special problems that overshadowed the July heat and wind.

Just west of the state line on the Illinois side, the South Shore Line’s two tracks crossed two tracks of the Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad on a curve. As the South Shore’s tracks approached the crossings with the Indiana Harbor Belt, the overhead catenary system rose significantly above its usual height, which ranged from eighteen to twenty-one feet, to reach as high as twenty-three feet above the rails. This condition certainly was not unique. At every railroad line the South Shore crossed between Hammond and South Bend, Indiana state law required that all overhead wires at the crossings of two railroad lines exceed twenty-two feet in height, to provide a safe clearance for trainmen on top of freight cars. However, the variations in the height of the wire could not be met by the railroad’s homemade work equipment. The two gondolas behind the work train had fixed, temporary platforms. In addition, the placement of the railroad crossing in the middle of a curve required the linemen to pull the new wire taut and to tie it to numerous pull-off wires connected to wooden line poles on the outside of the curve, forcing the springy, tightly pulled steel wire to follow the curvature of the track at the midpoint between the rails. Finally, the continued operation of the railroad on the westbound track while the line crew worked on the eastbound line required that the electrical current in the overhead be kept live at the usual operating level of 6,600 volts alternating current (AC). Hanging a rising, curving, springy, live high-voltage catenary wire was all in a day’s work for a lineman.

The 6,600-volt AC power system also created some unique work conditions for South Shore linemen and trainmen that differed from those of the 600-volt direct current (DC) systems in vogue on other midwestern electric railroads during the late 1900s and early 1910s. Motorman Carl E. Hedstrom, who worked for the Chicago, Lake Shore and South Bend Railway beginning about 1921, related that whenever the weather was rainy and a conductor needed to step into a telephone booth alongside the track to call the dispatcher, the conductor would jump into the telephone booth and jump out because the booth was not insulated and the surrounding electric field was so strong. “[T]here would be enough of a static electricity that you could feel it, and none of them wanted to have anything to do with that 6600—that was hot stuff—really hot stuff,” Hedstrom noted. In a nighttime encounter with 6,600 volts sometime before 1926, a carman at the Gary passenger car yard attempted to move an interurban car forward on a wye track to turn it around. Because the carman used the pantagraph in the middle of the car roof, rather than the trolley poles at the ends, the pantagraph slipped to one side of the catenary in the middle of the curve, tearing the wire down onto the track. The live wire on the rails “really made some fireworks” in the dark. Hedstrom’s brother, Roy, who was working as a second carman on the ground, flung up his arms in fright and fled for the safety of the carman’s room inside the freight station. The next morning, his buddies had a good laugh when they found he had thrown his lantern over the roof of the freight house.

At State Line curve that warm July morning, the overhead catenary wires were live with 6,600 volts AC as the linemen worked on the eastbound track. The men climbed off the box motor and threw their screwdrivers, hammers, wrenches, gas tongs, and other wire-working tools up onto the platform atop the converted tool car 305. The line foreman stayed on the ground, while the seven linemen individually climbed two ladders on each side of the tool car. They then jumped over to the covered gondolas and pulled several sawhorses and trestles, which stood between three-and-a-half feet and four feet high and were built of two-by-fours or two-by-sixes, up onto the platforms atop of the cars. The sawhorses were about four feet long, while the top of the cars were about ten feet wide. This allowed less than three feet of platform between the edges of the cars and the sawhorses and planks three and a half feet above. On top of the sawhorses and trestles, the men placed two planks one foot wide by three inches thick, running sixteen feet long. They placed each trestle perpendicular to the wire and parallel to the car ends, then placed two planks on top of the trestles a foot or eighteen inches apart on each side of the overhead catenary wire, so that one man could stand on a plank on one side of the wire and another man on the other side. If the platforms holding the men could not be raised, they would have to rig up a temporary solution. Originally, the foreman in charge had directed or suggested the use of trestles and long planks when the crew first encountered the problem at a railroad crossing. As a result, on three or four separate days, the linemen stood on planks one foot wide, balanced on top of trestles roughly four feet high on top of temporarily constructed plank platforms about eighteen feet above the rails.

A man named Hartley and another lineman stationed themselves on the platform on top of the tool car. The next car, a gondola with a platform, supported Warring and Fellers. A trolley pole mounted on the platform of the car acted as an electrical ground when Warring released it from its hook and guided it into contact with the live overhead wire. Finally, C. F. Buckley, Charles W. Hunter, and Charles Harper stood on the platform above the second gondola. The five men on the gondola car platforms set up the sawhorses and trestles, then staged the long, narrow planks on them along the lengths of the cars. The two men on top of the tool car platform utilized two movable iron ladders affixed to the car to support four boards, two on each side of the wire. Britt, the foreman, remained on the ground.

The men climbed onto the footwide planks atop the sawhorses. Warring stood on the outside of the curved wire, while Fellers stood on the inside of the curve, facing Warring. Below them at their legs, the trolley pole with its grooved wheel pressed up against the wire to draw the static electrical field away from the live 6,600-volt contact wires they would be handling. The men began manipulating the new steel wire, which was tied to the side of the worn copper contact wire on the outside of the curve. The two men loosened the hangers holding the steel wire in order to screw clips onto it, then pull it under the worn copper contact wire. The clips had eyes on both sides to support the contact wire with a perpendicular span wire and to pull the contact wire into place above the center of the curving track. As they freed the steel wire from thin wire hangers that tied it to the copper wire, the steel wire dropped down and sprang towards the inside of the curve. Fellers and Warring then would pull up the steel wire, attach the clip and steel wire underneath the copper wire, and tighten the clip to hold the two wires together, one under the other.

Atop the plank, Warring held a piece of overhead wire hardware called a strain—a wooden insulator rod about four feet long, with metal eyes at both ends—to pry and pull the steel wire under the copper wire. Usually, a strain would be used as an insulator between the metal cross arm that supported the catenary wires and the clip that held the contact wire. A strain might also be placed between a guy wire and the ohverhead system, or between a trolley hanger and a perpendicular span wire holding up the catenary. Warring held the strain plumb with the top wire to pull the loose lower wire outward, while Fellers used a lineman’s tool called gas tongs to grasp and turn the heavy, resistant wire. Fellers held the gas tongs in one hand, twisted the wire, then with his other hand attempted to place a clip on the grooves of the wire. Warring pulled outward on the wire, keeping it from springing inward towards Fellers. Fellers secured the clip on the wire and turned the key to tighten it.